Get Email Updates

The Dispatch E-Edition

All current subscribers have full access to Digital D, which includes the E-Edition and
unlimited premium content on Dispatch.com, BuckeyeXtra.com, BlueJacketsXtra.com and
DispatchPolitics.com.
Subscribe
today!

BUDAPEST, Hungary — Hungarians collaborated with Nazis in sending nearly a half-million Jews to
their death, Hungary’s president said yesterday in a rare public acknowledgement of a wartime past
that Jewish groups say is often glossed over.

Earlier yesterday, an American historian said he was returning an award he received from the
previous head of state in protest of what he called the government’s attempt to erase Hungary’s
role in the Holocaust.

In a statement prepared for today’s Holocaust Memorial Day, President Janos Ader said that if
the war had gone according to the plans of Adolf Hitler and his Hungarian fascist allies, Jews
would have been exterminated from Hungary.

“Auschwitz may be hundreds of kilometers from Hungary, but it is part of Hungarian history,”
Ader wrote. “This death camp was the scene of the inhumane suffering, humiliation and death of
nearly half a million of our compatriots.”

Jewish groups have criticized the center-right government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban for
what they see as its lackluster attempt to fight anti-Semitism.

But Orban has said he will do everything to stamp out growing anti-Semitism in a country where a
far-right party, Jobbik, again openly uses anti-Semitic rhetoric and in November unveiled a statue
of wartime leader Miklos Horthy, an ally of Hitler’s.

Before Ader’s statement was released, veteran Romanian-born historian Randolph Braham, who
settled in the United States after World War II, said he was returning Hungary’s Order of Merit,
which he received in 2011 for his work, including on the Hungarian Holocaust.

In Hungary, the Holocaust began years before the country came under direct German occupation in
1944. Under Horthy, anti-Jewish pogroms, several reported mass killings and the deportation of
thousands of Jews to labor camps occurred.

Occupying German forces then received willing help from Hungarian authorities in deporting
437,000 Jews within a few weeks in 1944.